August Movies Part 1: Trap & Didi

I have kicked off August with two very different movies. One is a horror-thriller by an established writer-director who is trying to get his kid into the biz and the other is a moving and funny coming-of-age film by a first-time writer-director who shows immense promise. Which will you choose?!

Trap: Written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan, my first thought on leaving the theater was that this was the ultimate nepo baby film. Josh Hartnett stars as Cooper, a man who is bringing his daughter, Riley (Ariel Donoghue), to a long-anticipated concert by a pop star named Lady Raven, who is played by Saleka Night Shyamalan. Yes, she is Shyamalan’s daughter, and all the songs in this movie were written and performed by her and she proceeds to also have quite a bit of acting to do towards the end. Did her father write this movie just so she could showcase her talents? It certainly feels like it.

Setting the nepotism aside, however, Hartnett does offer up a grand performance. Because the actual premise of this film is that Cooper is a serial killer, and the police have found out he will be at this concert. The whole concert is a sting operation to get this guy, but when he discovers that plan, we get a cat-and-mouse game where he is desperately trying to outwit the police, while ensuring his young daughter is none the wiser about her dear father’s extracurricular activities.

It’s a fun premise, and Hartnett is great at being super creepy while pretending to be extremely ordinary. And Ariel Donoghue is also great as the excited teenage girl who is thrilled to see Lady Raven while being oblivious to her father’s sudden panic. But every other character in this movie feels like a weird caricature of a human, with terribly stilted dialogue and a blank affect. While it’s fun to see how Cooper evades the police, the third act of this film jumps the shark a few too many times and I was ready for it all to be over about a half hour before it mercifully ended. This movie started out strong but ended with a decided whimper. The next time Shyamalan writes a movie, I hope he can focus more on his actors and less on his daughters.

Didi: Written and directed by Sean Wang, who also directed the gorgeous Oscar-nominated short film, Nai Nai & Wai Po, this is a moving film that tells us the story of Chris Wang (Izaac Wang), a middle schooler in 2008, who is about to have a very transformative summer. We follow his adventures on AOL Instant Messenger, where he chats with his friends in lewd brospeak, and then crushes on a girl named Madi, whose MySpace page he studies obsessively in order to get an edge on how to impress her at parties. He also has to navigate testy relationships with his older sister, Vivian (Shirley Chen) who will be off to college soon, his mother, Chungsing (the incandescent Joan Chen), and his paternal grandmother, Nai Nai (the excellent Chang Li Hua, Sean Wang’s real-life Nai Nai from his short film), who lives with them. His father is absent, working in Taiwan to provide for the family, and his mother is quietly struggling to keep this family together, putting aside her own dreams to be an artist so her children can live that first-generation immigrant dream.

There’s plenty of casual Asian racism, but also just the casual cruelty that characterizes being a teenage boy (gear up for some homophobic slurs - in 2008, the teens were not as woke as they are now). Chris befriends a group of skateboarders and tried to reinvent himself as a skate filmer, but while that hobby might end up defining his life, these older friends also expose him to other things that might be slightly more problematic. 

This movie is mostly vibes, but perfectly captures a snapshot in time. For people who were American teens in this era, there will be much to recognize. Unfortunately, as is the case with most movies about the “teen experience,” I couldn’t really relate as my adolescence consisted of doing my homework, reading books, and watching TV so I could avoid my pitiful inability to make any friends at school. However, I did find myself relating a lot more to the mom, an immigrant with thwarted ambitions, who had pictured a very different life for herself upon coming to America and was now slowly crushed down by responsibility. Ah yes, the true immigrant experience. This movie has something searingly emotional to impart to almost any viewer, so head to the theater immediately to wallow in all the feels and re-live all the best and worst parts of being a thirteen-year-old. Or their parent.